Dammit, Kirk Lazarus was supposed to be SATIRE
For those of you who've managed to miss the news of the casting of The Last Airbender live-action movie, here's context for the following. Summary: in adapting a animated series set in a world essentially filled with analogs of Asian and Inuit cultures, the filmmakers have chosen an all-white main cast.
To shorten drastically a longer rant I actually already had brewing in my head, situations like this are exactly why I think, "well, maybe he was the best actor for the part" and other "colorblind casting" notions are such specious arguments.
They're specious because they assume a world where the default setting is actually neutral, rather than being so far up the ass of "white, straight male" that Hollywood will not only assume a white, straight male lead unless there's a "reason" to do otherwise, but will cheerfully rewrite the race/ethnicity or gender of fictional characters and even of real people to assure a white male lead.
And then, of course, if your "reason" for conceptualizing a part as something other than "white, straight male" is "well, I really wanted to see an action movie with a Latina lead," well, you're making things political. As if there's anything not political about a television or movie screen filled with almost exclusively white faces and male leads. And yes, this is years of fighting this particular battle in academic curricula finally bubbling over.
Casting is not neutral. It's not, and we can't pretend that it can be in a system where crap like this happens.
To shorten drastically a longer rant I actually already had brewing in my head, situations like this are exactly why I think, "well, maybe he was the best actor for the part" and other "colorblind casting" notions are such specious arguments.
They're specious because they assume a world where the default setting is actually neutral, rather than being so far up the ass of "white, straight male" that Hollywood will not only assume a white, straight male lead unless there's a "reason" to do otherwise, but will cheerfully rewrite the race/ethnicity or gender of fictional characters and even of real people to assure a white male lead.
And then, of course, if your "reason" for conceptualizing a part as something other than "white, straight male" is "well, I really wanted to see an action movie with a Latina lead," well, you're making things political. As if there's anything not political about a television or movie screen filled with almost exclusively white faces and male leads. And yes, this is years of fighting this particular battle in academic curricula finally bubbling over.
Casting is not neutral. It's not, and we can't pretend that it can be in a system where crap like this happens.